In December 2017, the National Graves Association launched a campaign to reinter the remains of the National Invincibles, currently buried in Kilmainham Gaol and give them a dignified burial in Glasnevin Cemetery. Since the formation of the Irish Freestate, re-interments of Irish republicans were nothing unusual. [Mehr lesen…]

How to inform supporters and the public about its political ideology is a regular point of discussion for all political organisations; even more so for radical organisations who cannot rely on the mainstream media for spreading their message. This is particularly true for Irish Republican organisations that developed a critical analysis of the peace process. [Mehr lesen…]

The past five or so years were rather difficult for those conducting interviews in Ireland. Nonetheless, interviews remain an essential source for those of us researching political violence and the Northern Irish Troubles. [Mehr lesen…]

As several of the blog posts of Writing the Troubles illustrate, oral history is a particularly controversial subject in Northern Ireland. The past years have been a difficult time for researchers looking to use interviews with former paramilitaries and those advocating political violence, particularly since the “Boston College (BC) Oral History Project” debacle. [Mehr lesen…]

Former Provisional Shane Paul O’Doherty argued in this newspaper last week that republican inmates didn’t qualify as prisoners of war. Here, historian Dieter Reinisch says O’Doherty’s view is at odds with British Government policy throughout the 20th century.

In an article published in this newspaper on January 5, Shane Paul O’Doherty argued that “captured (IRA) combatants could never qualify as prisoners of war” because they “did not conduct military operations according to the laws and customs of war”. [Mehr lesen…]

January 30 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the launch of the “Tet offensive” in 1968 by North Vietnam forces and the National Liberation Front against the South Vietnam Army and the US military presence.

The offensive not only facilitated the changing public opinion in the USA on the Vietnam War and heralded revolutionary unrest throughout the world in 1968, twenty years later, the idea of a Tet-like offensive resurfaced in Ireland.

This piece will argue, however, that rather than a credible scenario, it was a wide-spread myth among the Irish Republican prisoners’ population that facilitated the departure of the IRA from Armalite to the ballot box. [Mehr lesen…]

I recently stumbled over following sentence on a widely read Irish blog: “Cumann na mBan (CnamB) has been subject to several splits down through the years.” This comment was made in response to claims that Cumann na mBan “never split.” This is an assumption I also regularly repeat in my own writings on the organisation. The sentence that Cumann na mBan had “several splits down through the years” suggests that various organisations have emerged from the Cumann na mBan tradition. [Mehr lesen…]